Commission Drops Complaint By Former Princeton Student: Report

PRINCETON, NJ — The municipal civil rights commission has reportedly dropped a complaint from a former Princeton High School student and her father concerning a one-day suspension that took place toward the end of the 2016-17 school year.

Jamaica Ponder was suspended after a racial slur appeared in a collage she submitted for the school's yearbook. Ponder submitted the collage, in which the N word is visible in the background. She said she didn't realize it was in the background when she submitted the collage. The suspension was later rescinded.

In the complaint, filed in December, Ponder and her father, Rhinold, contend that she was suspended because of her race, as well as her gender and her fight for equal rights. They also claim that during the suspension process, the family was denied their due process rights.

The commission claims it dropped the complaint because the attention it received in the media made undermined the process the commission follows to fairly resolve complaints, the Princeton Packet reports. Rhinold Ponder said the commission dropped the complaint due to a “lack of will to take any effective action on this type of complaint.”

In the incident that lead to her suspension, Ponder accidentally included a photo depicting the use of the N word in the background of her collage. It is part of a piece of art that is in her house and made it into the background of the collage.

At the time, her father believed she was being suspended because she exposed incidents of racism in the school district, but Principal Gary Snyder wrote in an email to parents that there were "a few seniors" who were suspended because of the collage they submitted to the yearbook. Ponder echoed her father's stance on the suspension in her blog post on Multi Magazine.

"Your secret is out, PHS," she wrote. "Everyone knows that Princeton Public Schools has constantly and consistently failed people of color and there is energy wasted in trying to mask the inconvenient truth in arbitrary suspensions. Just because you maim the messenger doesn't mean the truth dies with them."

Ponder first made headlines when she exposed a game of "Jews vs. Nazis" beer pong being played by high school students. She then tackled a Snapchat post in which a white student used a racial slur in reference to the black students she was with on a school bus.

She then wrote about a black student who was blamed for giving a brownie laced with marijuana to another student.

"Why would u tell your mom I gave you pot brownies when I didn't?" the unnamed student asks another in a text message posted by Ponder on her blog.

The student responded that someone told him to and that no one would ask any questions "Bc ur black."

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